


and yet the menace

by mickleborger



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games)
Genre: Mages, pride demons
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-17
Updated: 2015-09-17
Packaged: 2018-04-21 07:06:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 2,372
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4819790
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mickleborger/pseuds/mickleborger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Simple killing is a warrior's job. [...] Keep your wits about you, mage."</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Velanna

_gall_

She stands at the feet of the wild sylvans and her roar is that of rage and wilderness, of creaking branches and moaning hills, of thunderclaps and avalanches. She feels the grass on her soles and she thinks of her shadow, tiny between the shadows of the wood, reaching out in vengeance. She is the cry of fury from the Dales as they crumbled, wrath come howling out of forgotten ruins that once might have been Arlathan. She is as the wolf who stalks the Beyond alone, for if there is only one god left who may raise a hand against the lonely god of the shemlen let it be this one she evokes with her back straight and  _never again_  beaten into every broken carriage.

But, yes, again; and the templars have come to hack down her sylvans, and the merchants have come to rudely camp on sacred ground, and still they come like flies though the body tears at them and screams  _I am not dead_ ; and Velanna will not learn patience for this, since it is a motionless thing that is mistaken for dead. Her feet stomp, her hands lift up; her hands are fists, her throat is raw. She is the voice of her people who will not bow, never again.

But, yes, again; and in the distance the Chantry bell tolls like the heavy tread of doom, and in the distance the grasslands draw closer, and in the distance there is smoke from no wholesome fire; and Velanna will not wait for this creeping death in peace like a rotting stump. Her staff clacks, her knife glints; her teeth clench, Seranni is gone.

We go barefoot so our steps are not heard.


	2. Jowan

_hubris_

To live one’s life in the Circle is to know the world only through the narrow windows of a tower, better suited for arrows than for words. To be from such a small age under the tutelage of the Chantry with its armed guards and controlled texts is to see all else as alien and wild, the sun far too bright after the steady glow of torches, the wind much too sharp after the soft stagnant air of tapestried rooms. For all he has seen in his short time under the open sky, for all the terrified delight he has felt in the rush of a creek between his fingertips, for the terrible awe he has felt before a meadow alight with the touch of a full moon, Jowan is glad; nonetheless, there is layered under the bitter recognition in his jail cell also the taste of home which he lost somewhere between  _maleficar_ and  _assassin_.

And the dark presses down on him, and he hates it, and hates how he has come to it. His dreams carry whispers of freedom, and hopes of things like pine needles in his hand and seawater on his lips, which he has never known; but in waking he wishes he knew more of the Chant by heart so that he could drown out the whispers that brought him into a world where he has known keen and solid jeopoardy, and a fear more true and deep than anything he has ever felt; and should the end come because of this he will greet it with a quiet broken, “yes, milord”.

But he will not forget the sunburn he’d had to heal in the first days of his rediscovered freedom, gotten while staring too long in dazed wonder at the undulating clouds round buzzard-crowned hills, nor the sudden wind that mussed his hair and might in another world have taught him to fly.


	3. Wynne

_temerity_

When she was thirty-eight Wynne was sent with a small regiment of templars to Amaranthine to investigate news of a vaguely-described commotion there - probably trivial, with no need even for Circle presence, but the First Enchanter had said it was best to expect the worst, and the Knight-commander had muttered about the haunted Wending Wood, and after much vehement lobbying Wynne secured her place in the troupe (swords and antimage abilities are not, after all, universally viable defenses). She has never before been to Amaranthine, much less to any haunted wood, and all the long voyage south she kept her eye firmly on the horizon for the first sign of white stone or vengeful tree.

With her was a young templar - Ser Deirdre, of Gwaren, who would die some years later while running a very similar errand right through a mysterious ambush - still adamant in her ideals, who sometimes brought Wynne wine and said she reminded her a little of her favorite aunt, the young one who chased seagulls away with an old boot swung menacingly by the laces. Years before it would have been an older sister, and in the next few it would become elder aunt; and after Deirdre there would be mother, and yet still grandmother, and still Wynne looks wistfully to the great doors of the tower while Irving chuckles behind her.

She’d found a strange flower when in a moment of confusion she lost her templars in the Wood which she found not in the least haunted, and brought it back to Ines who has always loved such things. Deirdre had a name for it, the one they use in Gwaren; but the Circle Tower is not Gwaren, and there can be no living flowers there besides.


	4. Uldred

_arrogance_

To the knowledge and irritation of those colleagues close enough to his age and position Uldred was always an avid member of his fraternity. It’s true: very young, he may have thought quieter thoughts, but it took him little time after his Harrowing to do away with any ideas of civility. Maybe he took offense to the sword he awoke to find at his throat. Maybe some senior enchanter of his time had approached him later, recognizing in young Uldred’s eyes a very particular fire, the way Uldred would in other apprentices in his old age - history is, after all, shocking repetitive.

But there have always been libertarians in the Circles, and in Ferelden following the defeat of the Empire their voices are exceptionally strong. What does it matter if the mages speak out? If anything, it is good for dissenters to mutter between yellowed books, so that the library is not silent in fear or complacency. There have always been libertarians in the Circles, and Uldred on the misty waters of Lake Calenhad is among the loudest.

But he cannot block from his mind the doubt that was planted there and rusts like a knife wedged in a rock, cannot unlearn his lessons about the Maker’s plan and the place set for him at his birth. He hisses to that corner of his brain that if the Maker has any plan it cannot be within the grasp of men, but he is ignored, and still the doubt gnaws at him: what if he is out of line?

The creature he meets in the Fade is exactly what he expected it to be.


	5. Andraste

_pretense_

Out of the mud, out of the noise, out of the fear she rises; her clear strong voice rings across the land like steel, and strikes in hearts just the same. In a thousand years the statues of her will depict her as holding a flame, without knowing the truth of it: that as she saw the unlit pyre before her Andraste knew the irony, and laughed almost aloud that in the end it would be fire that took the firestarter.

But that day is many days off, and at the head of a ragtag army the bride of the Maker leans on her staff with her gaze firmly on the northern sky where she can almost discern the battlements of Minrathous. They are far, still, and many a young scamp is pacing on the edges of the mass, anxiously watching for far-off movement. There is nothing but the birds and the hounds and the song she sings under her breath at the vanguard with her lieutenants.

They say the Maker speaks to her, and certainly  _something_  does in the haze of the Fade so like a summer day - an autumn morn - a winter storm - a spring eve - all at once. Something, yes, but not a thing from out of the City in the corner of her eye with its great black gate slammed shut for eternity, where He sits brooding and forlorn. Something, yes, and a thing which speaks to her of freedom, of justice, of what is rightly due. Something.

In time this disarrayed army of hers will rise and run wild all the way to that city before the sea, one and raging like a wildfire; and she will be before that flame with her hands raised in challenge, and the Chant of Light will fall from her lips like choking ash.


	6. Orsino

_conceit_

The Gallows is a place where people are broken, if not by beatings then by the relentless wear. One is at best left gruffly alone here, the templars putting their focus on something they find more interesting; but then, it becomes necessary to be as uninteresting as possible. He may as well still be in an alienage.

It’s hard for an elf who has spent his life thinking of what it must be like to be with the Dalish to sit quietly between drab cement walls, and Orsino is tired of silence. He is tired of waiting for the end to come to young weary mages who step just a little too far out of line, as if in a kinder life he could not have been their Keeper. Far across the bay in the alienage the vhenadahl still stands, and he regrets not being able to spend time under its branches, his head against the rough bark; Ansburg had lost its tree long before his birth, and he feels he has missed something. As a mage he only has the big black splotch in the center of the Fade, the reason the templars so grind their teeth. Maybe the Maker’s city can stand in place of a tree in the Gallows where nothing can grow.

But he is tired, no matter what bitter speculations he uses to keep his back straight - not tired like Maud, but tired nonetheless.  _This is no life_ , he thinks with his nails dug into the wood of his desk. _This is no life_ , he remembers with a narrowed gaze firmly on the bolted door of the hall.

And in the multitude of examples of unlife seen from the glassy eyes of an apprentice who because of her outspoken First Enchanter will never close them again, Orsino most clearly recalls that last letter to Quentin.


	7. Merrill

_audacity_

Merrill touches the wolf’s head on her way out of camp, cheekily, as if to further confuse the confounder. She doesn’t like the way it watches her leave, pressing into her back like a big fanged snout. Sometimes she touches it more than once, just to be sure. It does nag her so.

She naturally finds the way up Sundermount by accident, wandering away to explore under the impression that there couldn’t possibly be  _two_  cursed mirrors lying buried near Dalish campsites. She has not been able to forget the Eluvian, cannot bring herself to stop pawing at the shards of it in the dark, wondering where it had taken Tamlen - or if it would bring back Mahariel - and what it had been doing in elvish ruins in the first place.  _Was_  it elvish? Marethari does not know. Did we learn to live underground from dwarves, or did that place sink? Marethari does not know, and moved camp curiously only after the end of the Blight. Merrill could not bring the entire ruin, but she could bring the mirror; it’s easy to carry something broken into so many pieces. Marethari is not pleased.

Merrill is not hugely fond of the cave, and for weeks she ignores it, uses it only to keep the pieces of mirror Marethari does not want at camp away from the ever-threatening rain; she prefers to sit in the grass and fiddle with the glass, and sometimes thinks she hears a voice drifting out from the shadows. It doesn’t sound friendly, but neither does it sound cruel; rather, it has the dry, patient tone she imagines the wolf statue would have if it could speak. It gives suggestions about the Eluvian. They are not bad suggestions.

One day she will be tired of working in the cloudy half-light and figure that her conjured flame will be steadier indoors.


	8. Anders

_pride_

He was born under a big fluffy sky with huge rolling clouds, and for many years there was a cat that lived in his uncle’s barn who hunted mice and liked to nibble on Anders’ hair. The cat was gone before the barn, and both were gone long after his mother. Stone roofs are sleek and have no clouds and he hates them, hates the dark dank rooms where no wind blows, hates that lake that’s just a little to placid and glaucous. The walls are cold against his fists, against his brow; not the almost-warm, almost-soft of his mother’s country home where she grew flowers during the rainy season, but cold and inflexible and decidedly without flowers.

In fact there is only one thing he found in the tower that he did not despise: the Chant, that firm sterile reformulation of all his uncle’s farmstead superstitions that followed a boy in manacles with hisses and spits and accusations; the Chant with its sense of right, and Andraste with her sword of fire. In the place he used to sleep there were only ghosts and demons, but there in that miserable box were stories about goodness and mercy and the lady he thinks must have looked like his mother who demanded it.

And this is what he thinks of - not of his uncle, not of the templars, not of the hissing he sometimes hears in his dreams - when a thing that calls itself justice and looks too foul to be truly foul holds out a putrefied hand and promises him freedom, and what is rightly due.


End file.
